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Ayla, the WifeWithAPurpose - white surpremacist, formerly Nordic Sunrise


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There are a lot of people who use commercial DNA tests only for the ethnicity estimate. Which is fine, if that's all you want. The problem is when people just get their results, glance at their pie chart, take it completely literally, don't bother to read the fine print, and then write off DNA testing as bogus because they're not seeing the Native American they expected, or even worse, because the test says they're only 15% Irish when they know for a fact they're at least 30%.

I wish people would just take the time to dig into their results a little - just spent 15 or 20 minutes, or even 5 or 10 minutes reading about how the company actually determined your results. I do blame the companies themselves for this to some extent, because they don't necessarily make it SUPER easy to find that information, and there's a lot of misleading advertising - Ancestry's ridiculous ad about the guy somehow discovering he was German rather than Scottish and trading in his lederhosen for a kilt comes to mind.

While the ethnicity estimate can definitely be helpful and valuable, the real utility of the tests lies in the genetic connections with your matches. If you're totally uninterested in that, cool - but that's where the value of the test really is. Thousands upon thousands of people have now broken down brick walls in their family trees, discovered their previously unknown family origins, and even been reunited with lost family members, via these commercial DNA tests. There is a closed community on Facebook called 'DNA Detectives' with over 100,000 members dedicated to this. Commercial DNA testing is the reason my grandfather now knows the identities of both of his biological parents (previously thought impossible) and I've been able to fill in that missing branch of my family tree.

The greatest misuse of these tests is probably by racists using their results to somehow try to claim that they're 100% whatever they think makes them 'pure'. But I have to say that I find it hilarious when racists take one of these tests to try to prove that, discover that they're actually not 100% European, and then scramble trying to claim the results are fake news. Stupid assholes.

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@singsingsing That's how my mom used the Ancestry tests - to help her narrow down relationships and open new avenues of investigation. She got several relatives to do the tests, too, to refine things further. 

What's funny is that the results told her that she and her dad had some Persian ancestry. But, she could definitively trace back all my grandfather's ancestors to Germany, Ireland and Scotland. 

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2 hours ago, anjulibai said:

@singsingsing That's how my mom used the Ancestry tests - to help her narrow down relationships and open new avenues of investigation. She got several relatives to do the tests, too, to refine things further. 

What's funny is that the results told her that she and her dad had some Persian ancestry. But, she could definitively trace back all my grandfather's ancestors to Germany, Ireland and Scotland. 

AncestryDNA recently refined their ethnicity results and they seem a lot more accurate to me (though I've heard plenty of people complain that it's the reverse, but part of me wonders if it's just because they're disappointed that their results are more 'boring' now, haha). So many people used to have these little percentages of strange ethnicities that they couldn't explain. Often people in the know called this 'noise' - just the test interpreting small bits of DNA inaccurately. There was always the possibility that it was 'real', but you could never really know unless you had a paper trail to substantiate it.

Even now, though, my grandmother has this mysterious 4% Norwegian DNA. We have no idea where it came from. She does have one great-grandfather whose identity is unknown, so maybe he was part Norwegian. There's just really no way of knowing! I know that before Ancestry's update, and in the other tests, it was/is very common for people of European descent to show traces of African, Middle East, and/or West Asian DNA.

(Also, I just noticed I got it backwards - ad guy discovered he was Scottish rather than German and traded in his lederhosen for a kilt, which obviously makes a lot more sense. :pb_lol:)

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Oh, I assume they are continually updating the tests with new information. And all that "noise" makes sense if you think about how people have mixed and migrated over the millennia. Ain't no one a 100% of everything. 

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4 hours ago, anjulibai said:

@singsingsing That's how my mom used the Ancestry tests - to help her narrow down relationships and open new avenues of investigation. She got several relatives to do the tests, too, to refine things further. 

What's funny is that the results told her that she and her dad had some Persian ancestry. But, she could definitively trace back all my grandfather's ancestors to Germany, Ireland and Scotland. 

In that case, perhaps your great-great-something-grandmother had a Persian mailman...:my_biggrin:

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